'The Broken Voice': New Book by Professor Robert Eaglestone

Posted on 16/05/2017

Professor Robert Eaglestone

Professor Robert Eaglestone's latest book, The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in early June 2017. You can discover more about the book, and how to pre-order, on the Oxford University Press website.

'Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?' asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: 'one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one's subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades'. Robert Eaglestone attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertész, that the Holocaust will 'remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory'. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, Eaglestone identifies and develops five concepts—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism, and kitsch—in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertész, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. He explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.

Professor Eaglestone's books on the Holocaust include Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Icon Books, 2001), The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004) and, with Barry Langford, Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2008). To find out more about Professor Eaglestone's research, please visit his research profile.